The Daily EO: February 26th, 2013

I challenged my husband to make something from his Alton Brown cookbooks in the month of February. So he invited his friend over for dinner on Wednesday night and selected Butternut Squash and Potato Dumplings as his recipe. I do the grocery shopping and he does dinners, so he gave me the list of ingredients to pick up. Tuesday night he was tackling it and this is an involved recipe. Not only that, despite following it pretty closely, the recipe ending up needing 3 times as much flour as it calls for. (ever try rolling muffin batter?)

I love white terry bar clothes for my kitchen clothes of choice. They always absorb, never shrink in the wash, easily replaceable. making dumplings is a messy event and for once we used up almost every cloth we had for the draining and drying. By the time we were finished, we had a pile of wet clothes and a mess of a kitchen. We tackled clean-up and I threw a load of laundry to clean up all my bar mops.

Our washing machine in our condo is some fancy european apartment sized ones. Ones that have no patience for North American foolishness of adding something mid cycle. So, once it is started, there is no going back. Sure you can turn off the machine, then turn it to spin & drain, and eventually, it might let you inside. I threw a little extra soap in to tackle all the oil and flour on the bar mops, but nothing unusual.

I noticed about 15 minutes in that the soap level was quite foamy, but figured that was due to my increased soap usage – afterall, I generally have the door closed to the laundry while I do it, so I really had no idea how foamy it gets during the cycle.

I was in the other room – and let’s face it, that’s not too far away when you live in a downtown Vancouver condo – when my husband called for me to grab towels for the washing machine. It’s leaking! Alas!

Wha?!

Okay – quick. Towels. Mop it up. Hmmmm. Not too much of a mess. Just a small leak from the very front of the machine. Weird.

But as stated – I can’t open the damn machine. So we mop up the water, turn it to spin & drain and keep a towel under there to pick up the water. And wait.

Long Night. And we haven’t even eaten them yet.

February 26th, 2013 Extra-Ordinary: Apparently, if you wash Butternut Squash Dumplings in a washing machine, they wedge in the door and break the seal. Who knew?